Fruitlands keeps past alive into the future (SLIDESHOW)

Renee de la Sea, with Sea Peas Face Painting of Ipswich, watches over Damian Snow, 5, and his sister Ada-June Snow, 7 of Lunenburg, as they try out a Native American dug-out canoe at the Fruitlands Harvest Festival. SUN/ DAVID H. BROW

HARVARD -- For the past 103 years, Fruitlands has been welcoming visitors seeking nature, art and history.

If the Trustees of the Reservations fill their mission, the museum will be preserved and used forever.

The first building to open, in 1914, was the home where author Louisa May Alcott lived for a short time as a child. It is site of her father's failed 1843 attempt at living in an agrarian utopia.

Afterward, the land on the hillside remained in use for agriculture.

Clara Endicott Sears, an art lover and philanthropist, was the driving force behind the creation of the museum overlooking the Nashua River Valley. She built a summer home on Prospect Hill 71 years after the Alcott family decamped..

While exploring the property, Sears found an arrowhead and began collecting Native American objects.

She also collected more mainstream art. Her collection of early 19th-century portraits and Hudson River School landscape paintings remain in the museum's collection.

In 2016, the museum which grew to include several buildings, came under new management. The Trustees of the Reservations, dedicated to preserving history for the last 126 years, took responsibility.

"It fits the kind of place the Trustees want to preserve," said Guy Hermann, the general manager of Fruitlands, the Old Manse and greater Concord for the Trustees.

"We welcome people to come and visit," he said. "We do our best to entice people here.

Advertisement

"

The Trustees is not resting on Fruitlands' laurels in the effort to preserve the past forever and to bring people in.

Most changes made by the preservation group are not visible to a obvious to a casual visitor.

The museum and grounds look much the same. A cluster of building below the road perches above a New England forest.

What a visitor does not see is the hard work going on in the background.

The Trustees are upgrading storage facilities and what hired a person to work on creating a richer inventory for research purposes, Hermann said.

The increased focus on documentation is reflected in an exhibition on display until early November. Books and papers from writers inspired by Fruitlands and the Old Manse, author Ralph Waldo Emerson's home in Concord, are on display. Some of the rare books can even be touched.

Curatorial muscle is a big value in what the Trustees bring to its newest site, Hermann said. The Trustees care for over 100 properties in Massachusetts.

Currently, an exhibit of holdings from the Appleton Farm in Ipswich, the longest operating family-owned farm in New England, is in Harvard.

In the pairing of portraits and writings, Hermann enjoys the continuity the exhibit documents. He can see family resemblances between the earliest portraits and images of the present-day family members.

Art and history are just parts of the value of Fruitlands. "For the Trustees, the property is just a fabulous piece of land," Hermann said.

Prospect Hill is one of the best places around to see the sun set. Hermann has even spotted folks who dragged a couch from the back of a truck to sit comfortably on the side of Prospect Hill Road and watch the light disappear from the valley.

Summer concerts on Thursday night are a tradition, he said. The museum has held sunset drumming workshops and will have a certified forest therapist to lead forest bathing.

Two miles of trails are open for walkers and leashed dogs.

The site even hosts a sport that did not exist when Sears was alive: cyclocross.

The mostly off-pavement cycling race, the Fruitlands Cup, sees riders racing a course of 1.5 to 2 miles through the property in the fall. The course is considered one of the most difficult in New England, Hermann said.

Welcome to your discussion forum: Sign in with a Disqus account or your social networking account for your comment to be posted immediately, provided it meets the guidelines. (READ HOW.)
Comments made here are the sole responsibility of the person posting them; these comments do not reflect the opinion of Nashoba Publishing. So keep it civil.